Can you be too ethical?

When “ethics” becomes a term for a style of reasoning about moral questions which leads its adepts to monstrous conclusions, yes, we can certainly have too much of it.

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Much the same could be said for some forms of Roman Catholic bioethics. Beyond that is the general problem of pharisaism, where ethical reasoning comes to be a way of demonstrating the cosmic significance of the mote in your opponent’s eye.

In all these cases it looks as if you can be entirely too ethical and anyone who complained of this would be instantly understood. But when you look at the complaint more closely, it actually means that someone has acted wrongly in their display of ethicity, or rule-based smugness – and to act wrongly is by definition unethical. So what looks like to much ethics is in fact too little.

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